Well Said, Bernie Sanders!

[G-Man]

Well there's no point in my trying to have an intelligent discussion with facts if I'm going to cite an official CBO calculated figure on the 2001-2011 war costs and you're just going to give me an unsubstantiated claim that "no, it was actually way higher than that." If you can show me something to back up your claim; i.e. maybe show where defense costs rose substantially more during that period than accounted for by the CBO figure, then be my guest. Otherwise, simply saying that I'm wrong doesn't make me wrong.

And martialartist, I'm not going to get into whether corporations should pay more taxes since that's an argument no one's ever going to change their mind on (nevermind that under Bush, when the corporate tax rates were lowest, the government happened to pull in record-breaking levels of revenue from corporate taxes).

The main point of my post was to point out that the great Bernie Sanders' attempt to post the deficit-blame on the "two unfunded wars" (and hence Bush) is dishonest and ignores the fact that both Republicans and Democrats floored the accelerator full-steam ahead for government spending.

FACT: the wars account for just a small fraction of the total deficit during the last ten years.
FACT: you could tax the "wealthy" at 100 percent and it still wouldn't come close to covering the deficit. Nevermind if you raised it a mere 10 or 20 percent--the government could burn through that in a matter of days.
FACT: the "recklessness and illegal behavior" of Wall Street was made possible and even facilitated by reckless, shortsighted legislation from Congress.

So Bernie Sanders, take your righteous indignation somewhere else. We have something called the Internet now where people can find the facts and judge whether you're jerking our heartstrings with hyperbole and populist rhetoric or if what you're saying is based on reality.